This blog site is a place for Anna Jaworski, author of Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome: A Handbook for Parents and My Brother Needs an Operation, and editor of The Heart of a Mother and The Heart of a Father, to keep readers updated on important news related to Baby Hearts Press and important information for the heart community. For more information about Baby Hearts Press, please visit us at http://www.babyheartspress.com.

Friday, September 7, 2007

HOF Update

I know I just posted a note about what I'm doing regarding public speaking and Baby Hearts Press, but I thought there might be some of you out there excited to hear about how The Heart of a Father is going.

Having my dad, Bob Daigneault, help with this project has made a world of difference. Because of some technical problems, most of the electronic versions of the essays were lost. I was devastated to discover this. We sent the word out to the dads and some were kind enough to send us what they had. Of course I had printed versions of everything I'd already worked on, but it was starting to look as though I was going to have to retype a lot of pages.

Dad went with me to Fry's to look at scanners. I got one for the business and last week we started scanning in an essay. Dad helped me get started and left. I don't know what I did wrong, but even though I seemed to scan the pages in correctly, when I saved them, something odd happened. I saved each page individually and gave it the author's name and page number. I don't know why the scanner took Page 1 and saved it 5 times in a row -- as pages 1-5.

Realizing how frustrated I was after a long time of fighting with the machine, Daddy came to the house and took it away. I don't know how he worked his magic, but somehow he was able to scan and save Jim Larson's 13-page essay in two PDF documents. They look great! He's already sent them to Jim for updating and revising. We're on our way!

I think what has taken us the longest amount of time to do so far has been housekeeping types of activities. We've been trying to reconnect with all the contributers and many email addresses are no longer any good. We've been trying to clean up our YahooGroup listserv, too. There are people on there we don't know and we're trying to figure out who is who and why they're there. There's the whole issue of who has sent in his permission form and essay and who wants to update what he's sent. All in all, it's very slow going! The good news is: it's going.

Dad made a timeline for us when we started working on this project and so far we're doing what we hoped to be doing. I'm happy to announce that thus far Daddy approves of the developmental editing I'd already done and he is looking forward to doing the line editing. I already did a lot of copy editing when I did the developmental editing, but Daddy is going to make the book more consistent.

At our weekly meeting we took a look at all of the wonderful pictures, videos and music that the dads have sent us thus far. We are so excited about this project! It really is going to be a special eBook experience. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to work on this very special project. And if you are a contributor and you haven't heard from us, it's because we can't contact you. Please contact me! My email is jaworski@vvm.com. Even though some essays have been accepted for publication, we still want to touch base with everyone and let everyone know what's going on. We appreciate people helping us spread the word!